Silence - Background Notes

Question 1

What genre

Answer 1

historical fiction

Question 2

Author name

Answer 2

Shusaku Endo

Question 3

What occupation is the main characted

Answer 3

Jesuit Missionary

Question 4

The persecution occured during the time of

Answer 4

Hidden Christians or Kakure Kirishitan

Question 5

The time of Hidden Christians followed what historical event

Answer 5

The Shimabara Rebellion

Question 6

What form does the book take

Answer 6

parts of written as a letter by the central character

Question 7

theme

Answer 7

a silent God who accompanies a believer in adversity; the silence of God in the midst of suffering

Question 8

author was affected by what events in his own life

Answer 8

religious discrimination in Japan, racism in France, a bout of tuberculosis

Question 9

Young Portugese Jesuit name

Answer 9

Sebastiao Rodregues based on the historical figure of Guiseppe Chiara

Question 10

Why did Rodrigues go to Japan

Answer 10

ro succor the local Church and investigate reports that his mentor a Jesuit priest in Japan named Ferrara has committed apostasy

Question 11

Half of the book is written as a journal of Rodrigues what is the other half

Answer 11

written in third person or in the letters of others associated with the narrative

Question 12

how does the plot progress

Answer 12

relates the trials of Christains and the increasing hardship of Rodrigues

Question 13

What year doe Rodrigues arrive with Garrpe

Answer 13

1639

Question 14

How do they find the local Christian population

Answer 14

drive underground

Question 15

How does the government ferret out Christians

Answer 15

by making them trample on a fumie

Question 16

what is a fumie

Answer 16

a crudely carved image of Christ

Question 17

What happens to those who refuse to trample on the fumie

Answer 17

They are imprisoned and killed by anazuri which is being hung upside down over a pit and slowly bled

Question 18

Rodrigues and Garrpe are eventually captured and forced to watch Christians lay down for their faith

Answer 18

true

Question 19

There is no glory in the martyrdoms as Rodrigues imagined but rather

Answer 19

brutality and cruelty

Question 20

Prior to the arrival of Rodrigues the officials attempted to force priests to renounce their faith by

Answer 20

torturing thrm (IMPORTANT POINT AND DISTINCTION)

Question 21

Beginning with Fr. Ferraira the officials tortured

Answer 21

other Christians and made the priests watch telling them all they had to do was renounce their faith (IMPORTANT POINT AND DISTINCTION)

Question 22

Rodrigues understands suffering or the sake of one’s own faith but struggles over

Answer 22

whether it is self-centered and unmerciful to refuse to recant when doing so will end another’s suffering (IMPORTANT)

Question 23

What happens in the climatic moment

Answer 23

Rodrigues hears the moans of those who have recanted but are to remain in the pit until he tramples the image of Christ (IMPORTANT)

Question 24

As Rodrigues looks at the fumie - who breaks the silence

Answer 24

CHRIST - “Trample, Trample! . Rodrigues obeys and the Christians are released

Question 25

The novel is said to have “deep moral ambiguity” why?

Answer 25

the depiction of God who has chosen not to eliminate suffering but to suffer with humanity

Question 26

Endo in another book says that the Japanese identify with Jesus as

Answer 26

one who suffers with us, and who allows for our weaknesses —identifying less with God the Father and more the personality of Jesus

Question 27

The Novelist Sought a Christianity That Speaks to the Japanese Soul… he used several analogies including a gardener and a tailor…recall these.

Answer 27

If a gardener were to uproot a Christian sapling from its Western soil in order to transplant it into Japan, would its branches still bear Christian fruit? If a tailor were to disassemble a Western suit in order to fashion a Japanese kimono, would it still be a suit?

Question 28

In background, the book may or may not have mentioned how the Portugese ended up in Japan.

Answer 28

Europeans first set foot on Japanese soil in 1543 when a Portuguese trading vessel heading for China was blown off course and landed on the coast of Kyushu. Soon traders and merchants gained a foothold, and missionaries inevitably followed in their wake.

Question 29

one of the leaders of the newly founded Society of Jesus, arrived in 1549, and within two years he won a thousand converts.

Answer 29

St. Francis Xavier, Japan is “the delight of my heart,” he declared, “the country in the Orient most suited to Christianity.”

Question 30

After Xavier, the local barons encouraged/discouraged the Christians.

Answer 30

Encouraged ….. by local daimyo, or barons, who enlisted the support of Christians in their struggles for political control, the ranks of the believers swelled over the next 40 years to roughly a quarter million.

Question 31

By the end of the century, what further threatened the stability of a country already torn apart by the warring daimyo.

Answer 31

quarreling missionaries from England, Holland, Spain, and Portugal

Question 32

In 1587, the Jesuits were ordered to depart, and 10 years later 26 Christians, including six Franciscan missionaries, were crucified at ….

Answer 32

Nagasaki. By 1603, when the Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu unified the country, the persecution of Christians began in earnest.

Question 33

In 1614, the shogun expelled all Christian missionaries and issued an edict requiring all Japanese to register as what?

Answer 33

Buddhists.

Question 34

Hunted down by Japanese inquisitors, nearly 6,000 of the remaining Christians were tortured and killed. These were the martyrs, whose blood, as the early church father Tertullian once put it, was the what?

Answer 34

“seed of the church.”

Question 35

How did one survive?

Answer 35

Th e survivors — the more, or less, fortunate — were forced to renounce their faith by treading upon a fumie, a bronze icon that bore the image of Christ on the cross. These survivors were the apostates, the fallen ones.

Question 36

Was the author of the novel Catholic?

Answer 36

The Christian faith never did rest easily on Endo’s shoulders. Ever since his baptism at the age of 11 at the behest of his mother, Endo often spoke of a faith as awkward as a forced marriage, as uncomfortable as a Western suit of clothes. “This clothing did not suit me,” he later wrote. “The clothes and my body were not made for each other.”

Whether studying French Catholic novelists at Keio University in the late 1940s or traveling to France in 1950 to seek out the roots of his faith, Endo was always a stranger in a foreign land. Singled out by Japan for his belief and by France for his race, he experienced rejection at every turn. To make matters worse, he contracted tuberculosis while abroad and had a lung removed. In an ensuing crisis of faith, it seemed to him as if Christianity itself had made him ill

Question 37

Only upon returning to his country by way of the Holy Land did he discover, as he would write in his popular Life of Jesus (1973), a Jesus as scorned, rejected, and betrayed as he. Only then did he discover an alternative to the lofty cathedrals and the militant triumphalism of Western Christianity. And only then did he discover his life’s quest: the search for a compassionate Christian faith that might take root in the Japanese soil. HOW DOES SILENCE MEET THIS GOAL?

Answer 37

Widely regarded as Endo’s supreme achievement, Silence tells the story of this era and of this quest. It tells of Sebastian Rodrigues’ arduous journey halfway around the world to Japan in the 1630s, in order to track down a rumor that his beloved mentor Father Christovao Ferreira had abandoned his faith.

Question 38

Smuggled into the island nation with the help of a cringing apostate named Smuggled into the island nation with the help of a cringing apostate named Kichijiro, Rodrigues and a fellow priest are sheltered in a mountain hut by Japanese-Christian villagers on the sea coast.

Answer 38

Kichijiro, Rodrigues and a fellow priest are sheltered in a mountain hut by Japanese-Christian villagers on the sea coast.

Question 39

In a series of letters brimming with what does Rodrigues write his superiors?

Answer 39

with confidence and self-assurance, Rodrigues writes to his superiors of the heroic work of Christ that he has been privileged to accomplish: “After Sunday Mass for the first time I intoned and recited the prayers in Japanese with the people. … As I speak there often arises in my mind the face of one who preached the Sermon on the Mount; and I imagine the people who sat or knelt fascinated by his words.”

Question 40

But if Rodrigues is a Christ-figure, Kichijiro is his ….

Answer 40

Judas, betraying him to the shogunal authorities for a handful of coins. When the captured priest is brought down to the sea coast and then taken to Nagasaki, the narrative shifts from first to third person, catching Rodrigues in the crosshairs of the author’s omniscient perspective. Helpless to avert the martyrdom of his fellows, he strains to hear the voice of God, still silent as Japanese Christians are drowned in the leaden-gray, murderous sea. “He had come to this country to lay down his life for other men,” he thinks about himself, “but instead … the Japanese were laying down their lives one by one for him.”

Question 41

Braced for martyrdom, riding astride a donkey, much as his Lord had ridden into Jerusalem, Rodrigues makes his way into Nagasaki, where he is thrown into a dark prison cell. Here he finally meets

Answer 41

his former teacher and present tormentor, the apostate priest Ferreira, whose task it is to persuade Rodrigues to tread upon the fumie as well. “This country is a swamp,” says Ferreira. “In time you will come to see that for yourself. This country is a more terrible swamp than you can imagine. Whenever you plant a sapling in this swamp the roots begin to rot, the leaves grow yellow and wither. And we have planted the sapling of Christianity in this swamp.”

Question 42

Silence is an extraordinarily haunting novel. Although it is never a comfortable read, in its deceptive simplicity it is as stark and unyielding, as elegant and lean as the lines of a Japanese print. Without ever moralizing, it is an intensely moral book as well. And, like all great works of literature, it hovers in a middle ground HOW?,

Answer 42

, taut with expectation, caught in the tension between West and East, answer and question, logic and intuition, strength and weakness, hope and loss. It is, in short, a novel for most of us, most of the time, as we wend our way between heaven and earth with our longing souls and our feet of clay